NZIFF: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

R18

Frequently cited as the greatest horror film ever made, Tobe Hooper’s raw, deeply disturbing journey into a sweaty, grimy, all-too-real hell still has the power to shake you to your core.

Even fifty years on, the creeping, nigh-on sacrilegious aura The Texas Chain Saw Massacre transmits is impossible to replicate: a grimy, shudder-inducing feeling that seems like it’s being beamed in from Hell itself. Director Tobe Hooper, with a budget of just $140,000, would create a work as influential and purely cinematic as anything the horror genre would go on to produce, a lean and brutally experiential descent into animalistic madness and violence. Loosely drawing on the murders of serial killer Ed Gein (though its claims of being a ‘true story’ were demonstrably false), the film follows five teenagers who stumble upon a household full of deranged cannibals while road tripping in the Texas backwoods, including the immense, inhuman ‘Leatherface’ (Gunnar Hansen) whose weapon of choice is the titular piece of forestry equipment.

Hooper channelled an America transformed by the televisual horrors of the Vietnam War beaming into households night after night to completely refurbish the language of horror cinema, at times approaching the avant-garde in his terrifying montages of meat, humidity and decay. The film’s transgressive approach to violence and sadism saw its being banned in territories the world over, adding to the notorious sheen of a film experience not quite like any other. — Tom Augustine

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